English

Dango: A Mixed-Initiative Data Wrangling System using Large Language Model

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-03-07 v2

Abstract

Data wrangling is a time-consuming and challenging task in a data science pipeline. While many tools have been proposed to automate or facilitate data wrangling, they often misinterpret user intent, especially in complex tasks. We propose Dango, a mixed-initiative multi-agent system for data wrangling. Compared to existing tools, Dango enhances user communication of intent by allowing users to demonstrate on multiple tables and use natural language prompts in a conversation interface, enabling users to clarify their intent by answering LLM-posed multiple-choice clarification questions, and providing multiple forms of feedback such as step-by-step natural language explanations and data provenance to help users evaluate the data wrangling scripts. We conducted a within-subjects user study with 38 participants and demonstrated that Dango's features can significantly improve intent clarification, accuracy, and efficiency in data wrangling. Furthermore, we demonstrated the generalizability of Dango by applying it to a broader set of data wrangling tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.03154,
  title  = {Dango: A Mixed-Initiative Data Wrangling System using Large Language Model},
  author = {Wei-Hao Chen and Weixi Tong and Amanda Case and Tianyi Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.03154},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

To appear in the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26-May 1, 2025, Yokohama, Japan

R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:07:18.315Z